You Can’t Rent a Community
Occupancy is not belonging. Twenty years building communities across the Arab world, and the same lesson keeps surfacing.
There is a comfortable assumption behind most community building, which is that if you get the space right, the people will follow. Book the venue, fill the calendar, open the doors, and a community is supposed to form on its own. It sounds reasonable, and I spent the early part of my career believing some version of it, until I had watched it fail enough times to know better.
There is also a quieter assumption nested inside the first one, which is that we got the space right to begin with. Everyone is convinced that their location is the best, their design is the best and their offering is the best, and they rarely stop to ask the obvious question, which is best for whom. That verdict is almost always reached from one side of the table, which is ours.
I have spent close to twenty years building communities, starting with Nakhwah, the first volunteer network in the Arab world, which grew to 19,000 volunteers across 17 countries on almost no budget at all. Different cities, different sectors and the same lesson every time: the communities that lasted were rarely the ones with the best space or the biggest events. They were the ones where people had a reason to come back that had nothing to do with us.